


Of Sailors and Sluts

by Missy



Category: Burn Notice, Reno: 911!
Genre: Crossover, Crossover Pairings, F/M, Humor, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-03
Updated: 2011-07-03
Packaged: 2017-10-21 00:00:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/218565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Missy/pseuds/Missy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was all a glorious mistake.  A little ballad about darlin' Clementine and her sailor man.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of Sailors and Sluts

She liked the way his drink looked.

He told her it was a mojito – who the hell hadn’t seen a mojito before?

She had, she said – cool and aloof – they made them differently in Reno, was all.

She said her name was Clementine Johnson.

He said his name was Sam Axe, and then asked her if it had hurt when she fell from heaven.

She openly mocked his joke told him that she should have introduced herself to him as Tarragon.

Clemmy’s direct manner distracted him for a moment, before Sam put on the charm. He tried to buy her a Cosmo and she rolled her eyes, demanding something harder from the bartender.

He called her Darlin’. After he told her he’d served a hitch in the navy, she called him Sailor.

They did an untold number of Motor Oils and Blond Sluts, in a subtle competition that never reached its conclusion. Their constitutions were too evenly matched for that, and they wound up curled beneath the table together, passed out, her head on his shoulder.

Sam woke up to discover her name and number scrawled across his hand in Firebrick Red Maybelline.

But he never called Clemmy.

 

***

Their next introduction came in the form of her forearm checking his head into the side of her cruiser. He had broken her nail on the way down, pissing her off.

Clemmy felt a wave of self-pride wash over herself as she cuffed Sam. She had collared him with absolutely no help, as her partner had locked herself in the back seat. Again.

After unlocking Trudy from the squad car, Clemmy drove her perp to the county lock up and put him up on trespassing charges. An hour later, some guy calling himself Michael arrived, having produced the necessary permits documenting Sam’s right to be loitering near the construction project on Ninth Street.

The identification listed him as “Chuck Finley”.

Sam tried to keep his gaze neutral as he waited for her reaction. The quick gaze she shot him let Sam know that she had the power to chop off his nuts – physically or metaphorically.

But she let him go on his way.

***

He sent a dozen roses to the station the following morning, with a card reading _Thanks for saving my ass – “Chuck”._ Raineesha wanted details, and Trudy was unsubtly jealous, but Clemmy refused to give up any more info, not even at Jim’s repeated request.

She found Sam waiting outside at the end of her shift. She inanely asked him how he’d remembered her name, he just laughed and pointed to the small bruise over his right eye.

“You’re unforgettable, Clem.”

Would she like to go out for dinner?

He was wearing a suit.

Clemmy couldn’t resist that, even though she had a feeling he was nothing but a con artist. She went in full makeup, in a tank-top and black skirt, to the nicest French restaurant in town.

They ordered expensively and drank extensively, and then they discussed banalities while playing footsie.

She asked if she should call him “Chuck” or “Sam”, and he laughed. “Just call me Sailor, baby, it’s easier.”

 

She ended up on his side of the booth. Necking with dessert and touches under the table.

Sex ensued back at her apartment, with its occult store gift shop motif, on the couch. He provided sophisticated intercourse with surprising tenderness; Sam, well attuned to the needs of a woman, flexible enough in the ways of seduction to meet any need she might have, simply followed her, gesture for gesture, touch for touch.

He was passionate, adroitly skilled; he left her gasping and weak. But after she regained her strength it was her show, and she left him bowed beneath her, his head thrown back, eyes sightlessly starting at the ceiling.

 

And she kept calling him Sailor at the top of her lungs.

In the afterglow – smoking a joint from her fancy cigarette holder, sipping boxed wine out of one dollar Coke glasses - Clemmy felt well loved, but there was something in his expression, in his vague distaste of her small house, that gave her pause. She fell asleep in his arms, waiting for the other shoe to fall. With her, it always would.

***

The next morning, he told her he had to be going.

Clemmy had expected this turn of events. He was fully dressed in the light of her apartment, she naked under the cheap chenille throw blanket. She asked if he would call her, trying to ask if he wanted to be with her without saying the words.

He sighed and said he couldn’t make promises, and that it was a long story. But he really liked her.

Clemmy said her number would be valid for a while longer. She wasn’t going anywhere. There were three years left to pay off on her bankruptcy claim.

They shared a shower, breakfast at Dennys, and then he took his Cadillac off into the sunrise.

She called the number he’d jotted on her bedside pad that night and it was no longer in service.

***

The ache of her whirlwind affair had been pushed aside – just a one-time thing, another relationship that lasted a few days and left her lonely and starved for affection. She got on with life, with the business of other relationships - one of those rare times where liking “all kinds” of men worked in Clemmy’s favor.

She was sitting in the briefing room when she noticed the manic gleam of joy in Jim’s eyes, and heard the words ‘big case’ and ‘promotion’ followed by ‘undercover sting’ and ‘Miami.’

Clemmy felt a rush of delight – they were a big deal back there, heroes – considered more than adequate for the job at hand.

But her blood chilled when Jim passed out fliers of their quarry.

“We’re assisting in the capture of one Charles Chuck Finley AKA Sam Axe annnnndd an Ignacio Suwarez AKA Preston Digby AKA Lionel Harriman AKA Michael Westen.” Jim punctuated every name with a tap of his pen against the sheet.

“What’re they wanted for?” Clem’s question met with scoffing from her fellow officers, as is the anxiety in her voice.

“According to the feds, grand theft auto, property damage, illegal arms, fraud….right now they’re accused of running an indoors brothel without a license. This is BIG people. Don’t fuck it up!”

 

***

 

Of course they fucked it up. Dangle should never have made Trudy her backup, and they never should have looked at Clemmy and collectively decided she would be the perfect decoy.

With three guns trained on her, she posed as Darla Datura, a hooker looking to show the high-class “Chuck Finley” a good time (and maybe work at his unlicensed brothel) , their “date” arranged by a woman with a vague Irish brogue for a Tuesday evening at an outdoor café in the Tidewater.

She saw the fear in Sam’s eyes the second he sat down at their table.

“Wanna tell me what’s going on, Sailor?” she snapped.

Sam winced before explaining that he really wasn’t really running a brothel out of Michael Westen’s mother’s house. And so he wasn’t some recently-retired sailor, but an ex-SEAL in retirement, working with an old friend and his girlfriend (“girlfriend” was uttered with complete disgust). What, he said, they were trying to do was get a girl out from under the thumb of a cocaine smuggler running a prostitution racket. She was apparently the daughter of “one of Sam’s old buddies”, and Sam considered this an important thing, and their solution to the problem was to falsify the existence of their own brothel, scare the enemy out of town with a show of muscle and might. The guy was named Bobby Teres. Clem knew the name – number one most wanted criminal in Florida.

“I want that bastard in jail as badly as you do, Clem. We’re the good guys,” Sam protested.

“How can I trust you?”

He stares at her intensely. “You’re just gonna have to, darlin’.”

“I’ve got my ass riding on the line,” she hissed. “Normally, I wouldn’t care, but…this kind of stuff crawls up my crack,” she said. “I need proof.”

He pulled a file out of his jacket and passed it to her. “He’s got an apartment on Rose Parkway. We think he’s living with Ana and he’s keeping her drugged, so I’ve been staking it out while Mikey and Fi try to talk him into buying the non-existent works off of us. Don’t have real proof yet, but he’s been coming and going a lot after midnight.”

“You swear this is real?”

“If I’m lying, may pigs fall from the sky.”

A branch cracked as Junior tumbled from his perch in the stripling maple three blocks up the road, discharging his gun as he hit the ground.

All hell promptly broke loose, as cops and ex-spies emerged from their hiding places. Had Clemmy played witness to it from a distance, she would have marveled at the sight of the Mexican standoff, and how well the three held off a force of six.

It was Junior who broke the tension, quite by accident. “Guys? My arm’s broke, guys!” He grunted in pain. “Ah hell, that was my Hustler hand!”

 

***

To avoid further bloodshed, Jim and Michael struck a deal – they would take down Teres using Jim’s manpower and Michael’s brains. The surveillance would continue for the next week while they located Ana, and then proceed in what promised to be a take-no-prisoners fashion.

The trade between them was a simple one – Jim and the squad would take all the glory for the capture of Florida’s number one criminal, Sam’s “buddy” would get back her daughter, and Michael would get a dossier on one of the guys who had a hand in burning him – a fellow named Caton who had worked in the Reno Sherrif’s Department years ago.

The days settled into a comfortable rhythm: Fiona, set up as the decoy, would work with Michael to draw Teres out, selling her as a woman of priceless and rare skills worth twice the money of any common street hooker and an example of the women employed by the non-existent cathouse being run out of Michael’s mother’s home. The offer was on the table to trade Ana for Fiona with the true intent of getting the exchange on tape, but Teres wasn’t biting. Jones and Trudy were assigned as their back-up, with Dangle and Garcia running the operation, Raineesha filling in on day patrol, and Junior recuperating his broken arm back in Reno.

It wasn’t a comfortable fit. Michael’s laconic style clashed with Jim’s stagy intensity; Michael’s serious intentions ran afoul of Jim’s greedy selfishness. Michael often corrected Jim’s minor errors without the man even knowing it, and Jim – besotted by Michael’s form – didn’t correct him.

Clemmy, meanwhile, had been assigned to stake out Teres’ apartment with Sam, and the two of them proceeded to shirk their duties for all the luxuries the EconoSuite could afford. Living off of room service, they spent their days playing strip poker, gamboling in the Jacuzzi, inventing new shots and reading romantic literature.

Their bodies slid together with the ease of a husband and wife, but when their minds finally met in the long, boring hours of the surveillance both were a little stunned by how well they worked together.

He told her about his childhood in Bethesda, the dullness of the area and his dreams of excitement, which led to the Navy. Slowly, the bonds of secrecy he’d attached to his world slipped away, and she found herself listening as he told her of the misery of his first marriage, his decision to go special-ops, his friendship with Michael. His fragility poked out through the smooth exterior of his charm; it was like scraping back the layers of a five-and-dime portrait to find a Picasso hidden beneath.

Clemmy had always been an open book, but she told him about her childhood in Reno, her mother’s hooking and stripping, Clemmy’s fleeing the state for freedom as a showgirl in Branson, then her subsequent time as a stripper, a magician’s assistant, a Deputy Sheriff, a barmaid and a groupie. She told him of Steed and Barry, about being fuckbuddies with Jones, and of the time she had almost found love with Garcia.

They matched each other, story for story, about wild ex-lovers, the craziest place and ways and times they had ever… Nothing he could come up with shocked Clem, and each wild story of hers was met with a knowing grin.

He asked her, toward the end of the week, what she planned on doing with her life, and she told him that she wanted to get out of law enforcement eventually. Maybe once she paid off her bankruptcy and fixed her Fico score she’d get a loan and open a bar – maybe she’d become an image consultant. She should be getting offers left and right thanks to the reality show, but no one had been interested.

Sam shrugged when she turned the question back on him. “This is my retirement,” he smirked. “Don’t think I could’ve done better.” He watched her for a moment. “Do you want to get married again someday?” He didn’t directly indicate ‘to him’.

She snorted. “I’ve tried twice. Both went right down the crapper in less than a year. You?”

“Uh….Technically, I am married.” Her gaze narrowed and he backed down. “Separated for over twenty years.”

“Sailor, there's no such thing as a common-law divorce.”

He laughed. “No such thing as marrying a dead man, but you did it.” He smirked.

She shuffled her shoulders against his gripping hand. “We’re both pretty fucked up.”

“Doesn’t bother me.” He smirked, rubbing her shoulders. “Does it scare you?”

Everything about Sam had come to terrify Clemmy – the way his laugh automatically made her smile, and the things the scent of his skin could do to her heart. But she shook her tousled head before resting it on his shoulder. “I almost married a Hell’s Angel when I was fifteen. That was scary.”

His laugh bellowed out, and Sam squeezed her from behind. “Damn. Good thing you didn’t have any kids – you’d’ve pulled out all this pretty hair before I met you.” Clemmy had gone deathly quiet, and Sam, attuned to women as he was after years of experience, picked up on the change in her instantly. “You did choose that, didn’t you?”

A deep breath. “Yeah. No.” She sighed. Then it spilled out. “One of my mother’s johns, when I was thirteen. We didn’t have money enough for anything but a back-alley job. She thought I asked for it, and we had a fight. Waited ‘til she was asleep, took her drinking money and bought a one-way ticket to Branson as soon as I healed. Never looked back ‘til I decided I missed Reno too much.” She looked him dead in the eye. “I haven’t been right since. You’re not the only one who grew up fast, Sailor.”

She didn’t expect the embrace she received, or the liquid gaze trained on hers. He said he was sorry, and she knew he meant it.

The lovemaking that followed was an oasis of peace, a long fall into safety. There were no games to be played – no pretty clothes, no pretenses. Their soft bodies pressed together, uncaring of their age or circumstance, the need a simple one as they met and fell together, cresting into the black sea of the silk sheets.

He passed out in her arms, from the booze or the expenditure of energy, she couldn’t say. Clemmy played with his unruly salt and pepper forelock and, in the silent darkness, gave him something she’d only given to two other men before.

“I love you, Sailor,” she said. “I love you, and you’re my man.”

But Sam didn’t hear her.

**

She cast a circle that morning. He’d never protested her working with tarot cards, had tolerated her magic books and blessed crystals (he’d seen more unusual things, he assured her). Clemmy took the small piece of blue sea glass she’d rescued from the beach at the beginning of the week, the morning she’d worn a navy bikini (they’d never made it back to their room that day. And they’d discovered the benches in the shower stalls to be rather sturdy). She kissed the stone before murmuring the proper incantations, took the rock and tucked it into the front pocket of his bright blue-and-white-flower print camp shirt.

When she plunged her hand into the pocket, she came up with a handful of crumpled checks.

She paged through them, noticing that each and every one was from a woman. He wasn’t living off of whatever Michael had doled out to him after all, or his pension checks. Suddenly, she understood how he could afford steak every night, the fanciest of shoes, the finest classic car.

She felt his hand on her shoulder and went into attack mode. “What do you want from me, Sam?”

“For you to stop looking at my things,” he said dryly.

She looked up at him, over her shoulder; he was nude, a tanned form in the milky white halo of moonlight. She tossed the stone at him. “I don’t have any money. I can’t give you what you want.”

He looked at the checks sprawled out across the motel carpet, allowing the rock to bounce off of his chest. “It’s not like that…” He took the rock and rolled it nervously between his fingers.

She stood, drawing up to her full height. “You know what I want? A man who’s gonna be there every night when I open the door. If you can’t give me that we should call it quits before you take a crap on my heart.”

 

His response was silenced by a bullet whizzing by their heads.

 

***

Four minutes later, the room was riddled with bullet holes and Sam and Clemmy were pinned down behind an overturned bed, firing through the front door of the motel room and frantically plotting their exit. Sam texted Michael with one hand, watching Clemmy load rounds as he tried to find their discarded underwear.

Crouching in the midst of their lost paradise, Clemmy jammed her head through the neckhole of one of Sam’s tee-shirts, barely pausing between rounds to pull it down. Sam let out a triumphant laugh when tires squealed out in the motel’s parking lot, the blasting horn and the wailing of sirens indicating that they came equipped with back-up.

“It’s almost over!” he bellowed. “Cover me!”

“What?” She glanced over her shoulder, watching as he crawled to the window and pried it open.

“We’re going through the door in bodybags or out the window in our underwear.” He wrenched it open and looked out – it was a two-story drop from their room to the pool outside, the only safe way to the ground.

“ARE YOU INSANE?” Clemmy shouted over the artillery fire.

“The Dan would do it!” he bellowed, holding out a hand. “NOW JUMP WITH ME, DARLIN’!”

As always, whenever she was around Sam, Clemmy didn’t think – she acted. They went into the water holding hands but kicked apart, struggling to the surface and the car that meant an escape.

 

***

Clemmy thought she had done it all, but she had to admit racing down the midnight streets of Miami in a stolen car, wearing nothing but her boyfriend’s shirt while he (completely naked) fired out the back of said speeding car beside his two closest friends at a pursuing Columbian hit squad, was a fresh experience.

 

And Clemmy had never felt more alive in her life as they howled down the street and Michael sat beside her, trying to tell her how to drive his car in that emotionless monotone of his.

“There’s a bridge out up ahead. Go left. Left,” he intoned, like a buff Ben Stein.

“I know how to drive a stick shift,” she snarled.

“She’s fiesty, Sam,” Fiona noted, an orgasmic smile spreading across her face when one of the mobsters met with a bullet from her Uzi, his face exploding like a watermelon dumped off of the top of the Eiffel Tower.

“Keep your head down,” Sam said, his bare ass wedged against the driver’s side seat. She heard Michael grumble about the leather interior as they squealed up the street.

She saw the flashing lights, the bridge out ahead…

“LEFT. NOW.” Michael said.

Clemmy swerved to the left and braced herself for impact….

The last image she had of the chaotic scene was the car that had once been tailing them turning end-over-end over the side of the washed-out bridge as their car rolled safely into a shallow ditch, turning over once before coming to rest.

“Sam,” Michael said in his calm, irreproachably mannered voice, “call 9-1-1.”

 

***

“-LEM! DARLIN’? CLEMENTINE!”

The world was upside down. That was far less alarming than the fact that Sam was shouting into her left ear with the force of a drill instructor.

She reached out and pressed her palm against his lips. _“I can hear you.”_

Clemmy watched relief register on Sam’s sharp features. She opened her eyes and smiled - Sam was upside-down too, and it somehow made it all right for her to be hanging, suspended from her safety belt in the overturned body of Michael’s car. She tried to shift her shoulder and hissed at the sharp pain that shot through her neck.

Sam’s hands were upon her, cupping, cherishing. “Don’t move. You jarred your head a little when we rolled.” He peered around himself at the darkened interior of the car. “You’re lucky that’s all you hurt.”

Clemmy didn’t bother to shake her head; she rested in his embrace. She felt cherished for the first time in years. “Hey.” He let go of her head and weakly patted her cheeks. “Don’t go anywhere, Clem. Do you hear me? I need you to stay awake, all right? CLEMMY?”

But Clemmy couldn’t hear him.

 

***

Colors came back to her before sensations – white, blue, and green. The walls of a hospital room.

She turned her head to see the wall lined with sleeping bodies, her sweet, dumb, greedy colleagues; the friends she had made….

And, sitting slumped over, his face buried in the rough hospital blanket as he snored – both of his hands holding one of hers – was Sam.

She touched him carefully and was rewarded by his stirring. A faint, sleepy smile – relief in his eyes. “Hey.” Someone had brought him clothing – a black teeshirt and a pair of jeans.

“Are you okay?” she mumbled.

He let out a tired chuckle. “I’m supposed to ask you that.” She noticed that he was wearing a gauze bandage over the right side of his forehead, but otherwise appeared untouched by their wild ride. “Ana’s okay. Michael and Fi got her out and left her with Jones and Dangle. She’s gonna have to go through detox, but she’ll be okay. Fi’s got a cut on her leg, and I got this – Mikey came out without a scratch, man, not even his suit was wrinkled! – and you have a concussion, Darlin’.”

She gave him a weak smile. “I don’t know if I want you to call me Darlin’.”

 

Sam tried to smile – it looked like a grimace to Clemmy. “I want to call you Darlin’, even if this doesn’t work out.” He took a deep breath. “What’s killing me right now is that I want it to, worse than I’ve ever wanted anything.”

Clem relaxed against the pillows. “I don’t have any right to climb on some high horse with you. I’ve been around the block….”

Sam grinned. “I know. Darlin’ we ARE the block.” Clemmy laughed, as she stroked the back of his hand, played with his stubbled chin. “You can’t preach with me, sister, and I can’t preach with you.” She began stroking his inner arm. He kissed her hand. “Don’t get too excited. It’s gonna take some time. Mikey’s still got a black cloud over his head, I don’t know how long it’ll take to get that notice cleared…”

“I’ll wait…” she grabbed him by the lapels. “As long as it’s not for too long.”

She kissed his lips. Then Clemmy buried her face in the lee of his neck as he came closer. “I don’t want to screw this up,” she murmured.

“You can’t, Clem. This is our block.”

Every last bit of resolve in Clemmy melted away. “You’re my man, Sailor,” she mumbled against his neck.

He didn’t say anything in response – it would be a year before he could bring himself to admit she was the one. But admit it he would – Clemmy felt confident of that, even in the instability of their lives.

The beauty of the moment meant more to Clemmy than she could express.

She didn’t even mind Trudy’s peace-disrupting question.

“Are they poking each other right in the hospital?”

 

***

It took three years for Michael to settle himself with the government – enough time for Sam to admit she was the one. Enough time for Clemmy to put down roots in Miami and arrange for a transfer.

Dangle had been sad to see her go – they insisted that they all were. (“You’re OUR slut, Clem” he had said fondly as she cleaned out her desk “don’t forget that!”). Gacia and Jones were angry but contrite over her desertion of the city she loved; both made their own plays for her, only to be rejected. She got a cheap cake on her way out the door and started work the next week for the Miami Sheriff’s Department.

Michael, Sam and Fi had established their own detective agency, and Clem watched it grow as she cleared away her own back payments (her tarot deck told her to clean her own house before setting one up with Sam). It was work and loyalty, and love on the line every day until they were all in the black.

 

***

He married her on the beach. It had to be on the beach, he said, because he wanted to see her in white against the sand, and with the ocean rolling around her.

It wasn’t legal – they both knew it wasn’t – and didn’t delude themselves about it being so. But it was exactly what they both wanted – a bond that was strong and true.

Raineesha ended up picking up Barry, Trudy gleefully ate Madeline’s cooking without a single complaint, and Michael ended up with her bouquet – and Jim Dangle’s number.

Clemmy celebrated by getting a tattoo of a sailor’s cap, draped jauntily upon her right breast. Sam laughed at the sight of it, but he never asked her to remove the other men’s names decorating her back. The sailor’s cap was closest to her heart, and it meant more than any fancy words could.

***

One day they pulled up roots and took the new Impala all the way down the coastline. With the money they’d been able to steal and scrounge they bought a small bar in a resort village.

You can still see them there today – Sam with his white hair and glowing dark eyes, tending the bar, sipping the best stock; Clementine, her blond hair silvered, bending over the table to flirt as she cleans the table, to the delight of the horny frat boys that make up their clientele.

They come home at night together to sit on the porch and listen to the wind blow through the palm trees, warm and dazed in the night air. The good life has turned them ageless, preserved them in their happiness like a fly in amber as they move with the water, their flesh joined in a merger of abrupt delight, Darlin’ Clementine and her Sailor man.


End file.
